The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1887-12-22
TALMAGES SERMON.
An Interesting Discourse on "The
Gospel of Health"
The Relation of Bodily Habits and ALL
ments to the Spiritual Condition of
a the observation-disclosures of Warm
ing to Young and Old.

Rev. T. Dewitt Talmage at the Brooklyn
Tabernacle was 1.-THE Gospel of Health"
His text was: -
Till dart strike through his liver.-Proverbs,
vii, 20.
He said: There is fash ion in sermonics.
A comparatively small part of the Bible
is called on for texts. Most of the passages
of Scripture, when announced at the
opening of sermons, Immediately divide
themselves into old discussions that we
have heard from boyhood, and the effect
on us is soporifc. The auditor guesses at
the start just what the preacher will say.
There are very important chapters and
verses that have never been preached
from. Much of my lifetime l am devot-
ing to unlocking these gold chests and
blasting open these quarries. We talk
about the heart. and preach about the
heart, and sing about the heart, but if you
refer to the physical organ that we call
the heart it has not half so much to do
with spiritual health or disease, moral ex-
altation or spiritual depression, as the
organ to the consideration of which Solo
mon calls US in the text, when he describes
sin progressing
Till dart strike through his liver.
Solomon's anatomical and ply siological
discoveries were so very great, that he
was nearly three thousand years ahead of
the scientists of his day. He, more than
one thousand years before Christ, seemed
toknow about the circulation of the BLOOD
which Harvey discovered 1,619 years after
Christ, for which Solomon, in Ecclesiastes,
describing the human body, speaks of the
pitcher at the fountain, he evidently
- means the three canals leading from the
heart that receives the blood like pitchers.
i When he speaks in Ecclesastes of the sill
owl ~ h. %r,a
spinal marrow, about which in our days
Drs. Mayo, and Carpenter, and Dalton,
and Flint, and Brown-Sequard have ex-
perimented. And Solomon recorded in
the Bible thousands of years before scien-
fists discovered it, that in his time the
spinal cord relaxed in old age, producing
the tremors Of hand and head: Cor the
silver cord be loosed."
In the text he reveals the fact that he
had studied that largest gland of the hui
man system, the liver, not by the electric
light of the modern dissectng-roonl, but
by the dim light of comparatively dark
age, and yet had seen its important fun Z
tion in the God. built castle of the human
body-its selecting and secreting power,
its curious cells, its elongated, branching
tubes, a divine workmanship in central
and right and left lobe, and the hepatic
artery, through which God conducts the
crimson tides. Oh! this vital organ is
like the eye of God, in that it never sleeps.
Solomon knew of it and had noticed,
either in vivisection or postmortem, what
awful-attacks sin and dissipation make
upon it, until, with the fiat of Almighty
God, it bids the body and soul separate
and the one it commands to the grave and
the other it sends to Judgment. A javelin
of retribution, not glancing off or making
81 ,rhk ,pI ly,f H.
to side,
Till the dart strike through the liver.
Galen and Hippocrates ascribe to the
liver the most of the worlds moral depres-
sion, and the word melancholy means
black bile.
preach to you this morning the gospel
of health. In taking diagnosis of the dis
eases of the soul you must also take the
diagnosis Of the diseases of the body. AS
if to recognize this, one whole book of the
New Testament was written by a ply
stefan. Luke was doctor, and he dis
courses much of physical effects, and he
tells us of the good Samaritan's medical
ton of the wounds by pouring in oil and
wine, and recognizes hunger as a him
derance to hearing the Gospel, so that the
five thousand were fed; and records tie
sparse, diet of tho prodigal away from
home, and the extinguished eyesight of
the beggar by the wayside, and lets US
know of the hemorrhage of the wounds of
the dying Christ and the miraculous post
mortem resuscitation. And any estimate
of the spiritual condition that does not
include also an estimate of the physical
condition is incomplete
When the doorkeeper of Congress fell
dead from excessive joy because Bur-
goyne had surrendered at Saratoga. and
Ia It of
at the news of his country's defeat in
battle, and Cardinal Wolsey expired as a
result of Henry the Els hth's anathema, it
was demonstrated that the body and soul
are Siamese twins, and when YOU thrill
the one with joy or sorrow you thrill the
other. We might as well recognize the
tremendous fact that there are two
mighty fortresses in the human body, the
heart and the liver; the heart the fortress
OF all graces, the liver the fortress of all
the furies. You may have the head filed
with all intelectualities, and the eas. with
all musical appreciation, and the mouth
with all eloquence, and the hand with all
industries, and the heart with all gen.
erosities, and yet
dart strike through the liver.
Let Christian people avoid the mis-
take that they are all wrong with God be-
cause they suffer from depression of
spirits. Many a consecrated man has
found his spiritual sky befogged, and his
hope of Heaven blotted out and himself
plunged chin deep in the Slough of De-
spond, and has said: ''My heart is not
right with God, and l think must have
made a mistake, and instead of being q
child of light am child of darkness. No
one can feel as gloomy asI feel aud be q
Christian" And he has gons to his min
lister for consolation, and he has collected
Flavel's books, and read and read and
read, and prayed and prayed and prayed,
and wept aud wept and wept, and groaned
and groaned and groaned.
My brother, your trouble is not with the
heart, it is gastric disorder or rebel
ion of the liver You need a physician
more than you do clergyman. It is not
sin that bots out your hope of
Heaven, but bile. It not only
yellows your eyebatl, AMI furs your